


exception

by justjoy



Series: once upon a timelord [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s03e10 Blink, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 08:35:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justjoy/pseuds/justjoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The file is blue, TARDIS blue, and there is no such thing as sentient tarmac.</p>
            </blockquote>





	exception

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for _Blink_ if you - gasp - haven't watched it yet. Also contains a minor reference to _The Time of Angels_.

For one fleeting moment, Sally Sparrow is sorely tempted to hold tightly onto the thin blue file and never let it go, because if she didn’t give any of her information to the Doctor then she might not have had to save his phone box from the Angels and maybe Kathy and Billy wouldn’t even have been sent back at all.

She dismisses it after a second’s worth of hesitation — it is because, Sally tells herself, she has no idea at all how the Doctor had gotten stuck in 1969 in the first place, so she can’t warn him away from that, and if he did end up getting stuck in 1969 anyway then he’d  _really_  be stuck with no way back at all this time. Sally is not daft enough to believe that no one else would have been able to send the blue box back in time, but she also realises that few others would even have ventured to that house in the first place, and fewer still who would blindly trust the instructions given by a man in a video almost four decades away.

(It has nothing to do with the fact that she would rather have lived through all that than never have known of this man who lives in a realm separated by a curtain of impossibility, speaking directly to  _her_ , Sally Sparrow. Nothing at all.) 

* * *

Martha laughs giddily beside him as they saunter back into the TARDIS; it is not often than they get a chance to walk slowly, after all, without the need to run from whatever happened to be chasing them at the moment. 

He returns her enthusiasm with a grin of his own as he flips a couple of unnecessary switches, but he can feel it fading with the adrenaline as his thoughts inevitably spiral back to the same thing that’s been bugging him for the past hour. 

Martha reads his expression, and guesses the reason behind it all too easily. “So?” she asks quietly. “Why would we get stuck in 1969?” 

There is no real need to, but he picks up the file from where he’d set it down along with the bow, wondering about its contents.  

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “But I have the feeling that we’re going to find out soon.” 

(It is just his paranoid imagination, the Doctor thinks, but the lights of the TARDIS flicker for just a split second as he holds the file. It is only for a moment, though — blink and you would’ve missed it — so he shelves it away in a far corner of his mind, a dusty memory only to be recalled far, far later when a different him reads a long-forgotten passage in an old text, cold wave of realisation crashing over him as he realises what he’d done that day.)

* * *

And soon it is, because one day, a day just like any other, they are both standing at the console when he feels  _something_  move behind him where nothing should even be, let alone anything moving with such silent speed. 

He turns around a moment too late. 

The space beside him where Martha had stood a mere second ago is painfully empty, the sudden lack of her presence pressing keenly on his senses. 

“Martha?” he says aloud anyway, because even if he can’t actually fool himself into believing that she’s just outside the range of his vision he can damned well try. Silence rings in his ears, anger warring with desperation. “MARTHA!” 

He is answered only by a fierce leer etched onto cold, unmoving stone. 

And that is when he makes his decision, because he will not let her go so easily. Not her.  

Not Martha. 

The Doctor blinks. 

(It is seconds later, as space and time warps around him at unnatural speed, that he becomes abruptly conscious of a weight in one of his many, many pockets, and remembers a woman named Sally Sparrow. And he thinks,  _oh_.) 

* * *

He doesn’t know how much time has passed for her, but far more has probably passed for him when he finds himself right at the door of Sparrow and Nightingale, and he is just about to turn away again when Sally walks up to adjust something in the window display. 

The Doctor can tell the exact moment when she sees him, although for the life of him he can’t read expressions that flit across her face in that split second. Given that the last two times they’d met — in a timey-wimey sort of way, at least — either one of them had been on a world-saving mission… well, he waves jauntily at her anyway, and tries his best to put on a reassuring expression, though he quite doubts that there’s an expression quite eloquent enough to convey that  _no, don’t worry, I’m just here on a social visit, there’s really nothing to worry about_  —  

Most people probably had little need of such an expression. 

A customer walks by him into the shop right then, so he waits by the door, catching brief snippets of their conversation while Sally fetches something from the back room. Most of the words are lost to the general hubbub of the street, but it is obvious enough which voice is hers, and he is glad that he remembered her speed of speech correctly, or the half-conversation they’d recorded would’ve been disastrous. 

Finally, she sees the customer off, and walks up to him, a trace of uncertainty in her voice. “Doctor?” 

“Yup, that’s me!” He grins, hands in his pockets. “Hello, Sally Sparrow.” 

“You know me now, then?” she asks. 

The last vestiges of hesitation vanishes as he nods. “I’m not quite sure how long…” 

“A year and two days,” she answers his unfinished question without hesitation. “I must say, you took your time, Doctor.” 

He raises an eyebrow. “Well, the universe is rather complicated, you see, and I was worried about getting here too early —” 

“Oh, I suppose time travellers like yourself are too busy to keep track of the boringly linear time here on Earth,” she says, cutting him off with a roll of her eyes. “So, what is it this time?” 

“What is what — oh.” The Doctor winces as he realises what she’s asking him.  

Apparently he hadn’t been quite as successful at the reassuring expression as he had thought.  

“No, there’s nothing, really. I’m the only non-human life form for quite a few miles around last I checked. Which was three minutes ago,” he adds when she eyes him questioningly. 

“You’re sure? I won’t get ambushed by, oh, I don’t know, sentient tarmac once I step out of this building?” she asks in mock seriousness, leaning to peer behind him. 

“That would be interesting, I’ve never actually met  _sentient_  tarmac before, although there was this planet where —” he cuts himself off hurriedly at the look she’s giving him. “All right, no monsters around that I know of, promise. I just dropped by for a visit.” 

( _After chasing down a stray Cybermat thirty miles to the west,_ he adds mentally. But really, he’s been closer to the others before, and he’s never bothered to drop by, so it counts, even if he doesn’t quite know why he’s made the exception this time.) 

* * *

Sally regards him with well deserved suspicion. “Really?” 

The Doctor’s response is an awkward cross between a nod and a shake of the head. “And to thank you.”

“I get the feeling that you don’t do either very often,” she finally replies with unwarranted confidence, though she shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Yes, she’d said  _see you around someday_ , and yes, she’d found herself occasionally hoping that she would, if for nothing more than to satiate her curiosity about the mystery that was the Doctor. 

But Sally hadn’t honestly been expecting to him to come back, short of a book-loving, video-watching creature from outer space staging a invasion on their shop.

The Doctor shrugs uncomfortably, shoulders stiff, and that alone is enough to confirm her guess. 

“It isn’t everyday that someone saves my TARDIS — that’s the blue box,” he adds by way of explanation. “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. The Angel’s presence activated the emergency protocols, so the TARDIS dematerialised around it when I was sent back. You could say she’s sentient, I suppose, although it’s so much more than that. But there’s only so far that even a sentient ship can go without a pilot, and I couldn’t risk the Angels getting their hands on her.”

Sally automatically files the Doctor’s words away for investigation later. She wants so badly to ask more, to find out what exactly had happened, where he’d been sent to in the past, or perhaps just how an Angel had even gotten into a  _sentient time-traveling box_  in the first place. 

But she doesn’t, because it is painfully obvious that his shoulders are still set rigid and square, although she can also see his expression soften at the mention of the TARDIS.

It has not escaped her notice that the girl who’d been with him last time — Martha, she remembers now — the same person who’d been with him when he was stranded in the past  _thirty-eight_ years ago… she is nowhere to be seen, and the Doctor hasn’t even mentioned her at all.

Sally Sparrow is perfectly capable of putting two and two together, and the answer is not pretty at all, even if she can’t quite tell what it is.

“Come on,” she says, flashing him a quick smile as she flips the sign hanging from the door to Closed and steps around him. “You can tell me what you’ve been up to recently, and treat me to a coffee while you’re at it. There’s this cafe just round the corner, Larry and I absolutely love it.”

(“I seriously considered not giving you that file,” she admits later, stirring her cappucino absently. “Almost didn’t, actually.” 

“It’s a good thing that you did.” He takes a sip of his mocha and makes a face before dropping another cube of sugar into it. “Stable time loops are tricky things. If you had broken it knowingly — well, I really wouldn’t want to consider the consequences. A temporal paradox would be the least of our worries, although I wouldn’t think about it too much if I were you. You know, wibbly-wobbly —”

“Timey-wimey stuff,” she finishes for him, and gives herself a mental pat on the back at the unguarded surprise in his expression. “Although I still think that you’re underestimating my intelligence.”

“That’s what Billy said when he saw the video,” he says with a wry smile. “Good man, I set him up with a publisher friend of mine.”

There is silence between them for a few moments, broken only by the clink of her spoon against the china.

“Thank you, Sally Sparrow,” he says finally.

She smiles. “You’re very welcome, Doctor.”)


End file.
